The summer 2012 anime season is off to a less promising start than might be hoped – one of the most anticipated upcoming series, “Muv-Luv Total Eclipse,” is already facing tracing accusations after it emerged some of its sexy pinup art looks to have been blatantly plagiarised from not one but two different sources in the same picture…

The purported similarities were discovered by 2ch’s plagiarism task force of otaku with far too much time on their hands – as usual, how they discovered these similarities is almost as pressing a question as why some illustrators still think they can get away with it.

There's a gif on 2ch showing the changes. The third girl looks exactly like an image of Haruna from To LOVE-Ru.
You can find it with google reverse image, or just googling "Haruna To LOVE-RU" to find the the image of Haruna.

Great, one of the most anticipated is just a clone .. This season reminds me of last year, only to cover the hole in the schedule .. Too bad there is still no hibernation chamber, at least I still have my old backups and old anime on sale. If the season save two releases will be much :P

It's an artist belonging to the company that made the game that the anime is an adaptation of a spinoff of. He's not involved with the anime itself. I don't see why this is grounds to call the show a clone.

Sometimes when you got to think of it, it's amazing how a simple piece of 2D artwork could give you a hard on... That goes to show that these guys who can really draw till such have very 'good observation skills and sights'in order to pen them down on paper... Ya gotta love what they can see man... :)

It's unfortunate they see the need to trace - seems really cheap of them. But at the same time it doesn't bother me much since this is only series promo art work. If they start plagiarising other anime series frame for frame.. then there is a serious problem here.

Even still, you could draw the same pose without tracing. You can just look at her hand and see it right away.
You can still do the stupid hand touching her hair bs but also actually make it a little original/different... maybe have the bend a little more/less, the curve from the palm to the finger be curved more or less etc.

It makes me think of writing a paper for english classes or something on World War II or something like that, you can look at that the same way with your train of thought "There is only so much stuff to write about WWII anyways" when a kid tries to hand in a paper he copied off someone else.

But in the end, caring about this will do nothing as it wont stop/deter tracing.
Still going to watch the shit out of that anime though.

Sure, if you copy you can do minor changes to seem original. Works with handing in papers. My point was that something like this can happen even without the intent of copying, since there are only so much possible poses the human body is capable of. It's even further limited because the characters faces should be visible.

But looking at the two illustrations side-by-side...they're nearly identical line for line. Even the way the bathing suit strings on one of the girls is exactly the same. That would be one hell of a coincidence.

The thing here is that these are obviously traced, no question about it. Even if they were based on the same pose from some other source image, there's absolutely no way that most of the lines and cell shading would match perfectly, as they do here.

Likewise, if someone plagiarizes parts of a report from a textbook, online, or someone else's paper, teachers are typically going to know. Many instructors, especially at a college level, actually submit all their students papers to online services that compare them against a vast database of prior works to search for signs of plagiarism. If parts of a report are found to have been copied from another source, you can bet that report will be failed, at the very least.

I'm glad to see people searching for tracing in artwork like this. People are getting paid to produce this art, and if they copy 90% of the work from real artists who aren't getting paid, they're taking advantage of them. It's alright to use an existing pose as a reference, but tracing a source image line for line is another thing entirely.

In a movie, you wouldn't be simply copying and pasting the source material, then tweaking it a little. Homages can be done with drawn art as well, but that's entirely different from just tracing an image.